Personal Life
Kitty Cone’s full name was Curtis Seldon Cone. She was born on April 7, 1944 in Champaign, Illinois. She was misdiagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was young, causing her to receive a series of surgeries that she believed made her condition worse. The diagnosis was eventually changed to polio, but that wasn’t quite right either. Eventually, she was correctly diagnosed with muscular dystrophy.
She attended a boarding school beginning at the age of 14 in Washington D.C. called Hope and Arms. The school had multiple stories of stairs, and see that Kitty couldn’t walk without her cane, and stairs were incredibly exhausting, her cousins who also attended the school had to carry her in order for her to attend her classes. Not long after, she moved to Kentucky and attended a private school there, where she witnessed extreme racism that caused her to get more involved in civic activities. She didn’t like living in Kentucky as she felt she was outcasted for being against racism.
Her parents then applied to several Washington D.C. boarding schools, and she ended up attending Mount Vernon Seminary. She very much enjoyed the school, feeling challenged academically, becoming popular socially, and even getting involved with the yearbook. However, after a short while, the Headmistress had her thrown out. Before being thrown out, she had arbitrary rules imposed upon her, like where she could bathe, and that she couldn’t walk on the hockey field. So after disobeying these rules that seemed supposedly implemented to prevent liability, she was kicked out. The school offered as a last resort that she could commute to the campus, but she could not board there.
Kitty felt that in some ways she was unlucky having to ultimately attend 13 schools due to a combination of her father being in the military and trying to accommodate for her disability. She often had issues with schools having stairs, and having to find work arounds from classrooms being upstairs. As she approached adulthood, she became more and more vocal about social issues, despite the discomfort and anger it may have inspired in others around her.
She really wanted to go to college, but as it approached, she became concerned about how she would be able to attend college as she mostly used a wheelchair now. Kitty ended up attending the University of Illinois. She figured out how she would be able to live in the dorms with her wheelchair, and decided she wanted to take part activities on campus. She became a cheerleader for the school’s wheelchair basketball team and took part in the Student Senate.
However, things changed rather abruptly for her when her mother died at the end of her freshman year of cancer, after keeping the knowledge of the diagnosis from her. She had to take the next fall semester off in order to help out her family back home, before returning back to school. She got involved with the campus NAACP and was running for Student Senate to regain her seat after taking the fall semester off. She became super passionate about the Civil Rights Movement at this time.
During her sophomore year, she found that her muscles were weakening, she so decided to see about moving off campus in order to experience living as independently as possible before she might need more living assistance. She also wanted to escape the confines of the dorm curfew for women, as it interfered with her political activism. It was mentioned by an administrator that she could be getting weaker from being so active in protests, or that she wanted to live on her own so she could have privacy to be more sexually active.
Kitty noted that the disability program at her college was very focused on only accepting disabled people who seemed the most independent and most athletic. The disabled people in the program were also highly discouraged from being seen receiving assistance, because it would reflect badly on the program if they didn’t seem as independent as humanly possible. She never ended up completing her degree and had six hours left on it.
She learned in her early adult life that she was essentially expected to die at any moment, because it was unknown how rapidly her muscles would deteriorate. Doctors discouraged her from even considering motherhood due to this fear. Kitty was also an alcoholic, which she likely inherited from her mother. She was in recovery in the 1970’s for her alcoholism. She adopted a son, Jorge, in 1981. Kitty was an open lesbian and lived with her partner Mary Lou. She died in Berkeley, California on March 21, 2015.
Activism
Kitty became intensely involved in liberal political activism during her time at the University of Illinois. She was involved with Civil Rights, and became a Marxist during her time at school. This led her to being put on an FBI list and having an FBI file, which she found out about and viewed later in life. She became very interested in Sociology while at school after taking courses in the subject. She was very active in the Anti-War effort as the Vietnam War was going on. She worked on political on-campus and off-campus publications as well. The disability program was not a fan of her extreme liberalism due to the program’s cultivated image of normalcy and respectability.
Once she left college, she moved to Chicago to further her work in the Anti-War movement. She helped organize high school students and moved down to Atlanta to help organize there as well. She enjoyed doing the behind the scenes work of setting up events and protests, instead of being at the forefront. In Chicago, she came in contact with the Center for Independent Living by using their wheelchair repair services. She was fascinated with the organization that was working for better disability accommodations and wanted to get involved, as well as further using their services.
This began her work in organizing for disability rights. She worked mostly in organizing events to help call for changes in architectural and transportation accommodations, leaning mostly towards the transportation side of things. At this time, the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was being reviewed by Congress, Kitty speculated that schools, hospitals, and etc. were likely responsible for lobbying against these accommodations regulations behind the scenes due to the expenses they would incur. She took issue with the Task Force of non disabled people trying to find work arounds for accommodation to make things less expensive for institutions, although they might be more expensive or difficult for disabled people. Or the factor that they wanted to make addiction not protected under disability, which she understood to be a disease, much as we do now.
So, in 1977, the organization who was especially pushing for this legislation, the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD), issued an ultimatum that expired after April 4, that action would be taken in the form of protest. The deadline passed, and Kitty was a part of organizing the massive protest in San Francisco in response to this legislation not being passed in the best way for disabled people. They organized for as many disabled people as possible to be present to have sit-ins.
The group of protestors was shielded from arrest as the law enforcement was afraid of arresting all these disabled people. They had more luck in their demonstration in San Francisco than the one in Washington due to the local law enforcement not really cracking down on the demonstration like what was done in Washington. It was long struggle as the legislators really dragged out the process. Eventually nearly all the accommodations asked for were implemented into law, except for the prevention of discrimination by health insurers.
From there, she really specialized in transportation accommodations organizing. Especially helping get a bus design produced that would included a mechanism that would allow wheelchairs to easily roll onto the bus. She also worked towards accessible rapid rail transit systems. She continued work in more directorate positions in different organizations.
She had since written about her experiences on the front lines of the Disability Rights Movement and her life as a whole.
Source
Cone, Kitty. “Kitty Richmond Cone” (PDF). University of Illinois Archive. Retrieved 17 August 2017.